Southern Grampians Shire Council builds a smart connected rural community community

Although small in size, our rural council aims to be a leader in Smart City initiatives in the region. In conjunction with the Smart Cities and Suburbs program offered by the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science we are therefore working on a number of technology-based projects to better connect the community and showcase innovative and effective uses of technology.

As a predominantly rural, farming area, the Southern Grampians Shire Council is looking to attract a young and active population to support and diversify our economy. We needed a tool that would enable us to:

• Share useful information to drive business and engage local farmers.
• Bridge the digital divide between rural and urban areas to encourage relocation to the region.
• Pursue a do-it-yourself approach to digital transformation that leverages a small financial and workforce investment.

Sharing data with business and citizens is at the heart of our vision of creating a digital ecosystem. To deliver this we chose to work with Huwise and its partner Peclet Technology to deploy our smart city and open data marketplace.

This is sharing data from a variety of sources:

• Weather stations installed in all major townships that show live weather data via a live dashboard that also allows access to historical data
• Water level monitoring at key locations across the area, including reservoirs and rivers
• Smart parking sensors located in car parks within the Hamilton central business district that give an overall view of usage around the streets
• Information on all council facilities, including playgrounds, public halls, toilets and sports facilities, as well as details of waste zones, showing when collections are scheduled.

The data marketplace makes it easy for anyone to create charts and maps or reuse the data through the platform’s open APIs. Data is available in multiple ways – and can be accessed, downloaded or viewed through specific visualizations, such as water level and parking dashboards.

Our future plans include extending the sensor network to include soil sensors to measure moisture in sports facilities and gardens to enable greater water efficiency and early warning systems for potential flooding. All of this data can be seamlessly added to the portal and made available to the community, ready to be accessed, visualized, and reused in people’s daily lives.

At SGSC we rely on the Huwise data marketplace platform for data sharing and visualization. Implemented by Peclet Technology, the solution collects data from sensor networks and other sources and then publishes and shares information via our smart city and open data portal. The project uses three key Huwise features in particular:

Huwise architected its solution on AWS as an IaaS and leveraged AWS’s comprehensive, secure, scalable, and cost-effective portfolio of services, including Amazon RDS, Amazon Elb, Amazon ElastiCache. This allowed Southern Grampians Shire Council to gain maximum value from its data sharing project with Opendatasoft as part of its smart community project.

The collaboration with Huwise has now been running since 2019, and has collected over 1.2 million data points across weather and water monitoring alone. The portal is enabling the local government to:

• Pursue its long-term vision to transform its rural community into a thriving smart, connected community.
• Reduce the digital divide between metropolitan and rural councils, providing its community with strong connectivity and digital opportunities.
• Grow and scale, easily adding new datasets and developing new use cases.

We are also demonstrating how we can act as a model for other rural councils. We showcase our success by hosting the Digital Innovation and Smart Agriculture (DISA) festival to show how rural communities are embracing new technology and innovative practices to gain competitive advantage.